Issue 20: Jack Belloli
from SPANDREL ROUTINE
Implied
At from moving, Ferdinand as
baboon. Or Ferdinand played as
worm, leech, protozoa, the thud
of my life. Ferdinand gone over,
with the rake, on the fat of the
hands. Ferdinand as an atlas for
dust. As windfall and as elephant.
Against the spirit of the thing, a
shot on him as a partisan over the
course of the final days, his love
burying him upside down in the
hay, projected to slash and bathe
Sebastian’s faith in the dark. At
chess, even when within, I propose
him to be another angel, watching
all this with the pen for it at his
lips. As a man taking up a room. As
a lad who will not be participant
with the woods he’s raising, prone
to demanding the trees be their own
tax belt. Then, delivered whistling,
as if it will be run through and will
be done as prose, Ferdinand takes
every light out on himself at the
mass for the evening of the world,
stacks his thinking carapace at the
altar, scoots to his own extinct event.
Wedded
Only the kind in cages, our kind:
born forth on different springs,
but cut to drink and waste at a
single pot. There is draff with us,
and feathers and flecks of gold,
wriggling at the moisture around
the seal, until any tidy botany’s
kept on hold. Love bears in glass,
as a bee can breed mediation. We
are bought to wilt with a universal
zeal. The stock yards will stop
tanks and ponder their due to us.
The factories shall be kept to as
we run down on the sands. Each
pared plant must rinse and refract.
My shares in glass, and your part
in my video, fasten us to a plot
with plastic filaments, no matter
how long our march to it is. We’ll
rid the pavements of alive petrol.
The arc lights isolate a fleece in dew,
frogged at the neck like a reused
bottle, dried out, up from the bank.
Jack Belloli’s writing on contemporary poetry has been published in Poetry London, Prac Crit, 3:AM Magazine, Review 31, The Scores and The Cambridge Humanities Review. Other poems from this sequence have appeared in Tenebrae and amberflora.
